Spotlight Feature: No Fluff, Just Full Features in the Fedora 16 Cloud

The Fedora Project is proud to announce that the release of Fedora 16, code-named “Verne” includes the latest features for cloud computing.   Fedora seeks to offer the best free and open source technology, integrated into a Linux distribution that anyone can freely download, use, modify, and redistribute.   The Fedora 16 release includes new features and enhancements for end users, administrators, developers, and enthusiasts.

The Fedora Project is committed to cloud computing and Fedora 16 reflects this commitment with several new cloud tools. This blog will primarily highlight Aeolus, OpenStack and HekaFS.

Aeolus is a tool set designed to build and manage higher-level applications in a cloud and also to create and manage private and hybrid clouds from a choice of resource providers, from private virtualization to public clouds. Aeolus’s capabilities in cross-cloud management are made possible by the use of Fedora 16’s Deltacloud service. In addition, Aeolus can manage multiple cloud types including EC2, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization manager, VMWare, and OpenStack. The three Aeolus tools are:

• Conductor: gives cloud resources to users, manages their access of the resources and their instances in clouds;
• Composer: builds cloud-specific application images from generic templates, and;
• Orchestrator: facilitates the management of groups of application instances in an organized way – i.e., bringing up multiple instances in one or multiple clouds with the ability to configure and relate them to one another.

OpenStack is also part of Fedora 16. The Fedora Project began working with OpenStack, an early-stage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) project that is complementary to Aeolus, on packaging and development work several months ago. And now, Fedora is proud to continue its track record as a venue for innovation and collaboration with the inclusion of OpenStack in Fedora 16, made possible by contributors from a number of different companies. The key OpenStack services in Fedora 16 include:

• Object Storage Service (Swift): A highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store for more efficiently, safely, and cost effectively storing data;
• Compute Service (Nova): A cloud computing fabric controller for hosting and managing cloud computing systems;
• Image Service (Glance): discovers, registers, and retrieves machine images, and;
• Identity Service (Keystone): authenticates and authorizes at high-levels.

With these capabilities, OpenStack provides a nice option for serving as a cloud resource provider for an Aeolus-managed private or hybrid IaaS cloud.

HekaFS makes its premiere appearance in Fedora 16. This distributed/parallel filesystem is “cloud ready” and is based upon GlusterFS. Specifically, it extends GlusterFS to provide features suitable to cloud providers, including stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, a management framework (CLI and web app), and multi-tenancy.

The Fedora Cloud SIG is delighted to bring new cloud features to this release of Fedora . With the combination of Aeolus on top of OpenStack on top of HekaFS, you can create an open cloud in Fedora 16 today. In addition to the features listed above, Fedora 16 also includes several other cloud-related projects, including Sheepdog, a distributed, object-based storage system for QEMU/KVM, and Pacemaker-cloud, a building block for application service high availability in the cloud which is reusable in cloud management systems.

For more information about Fedora 16 and to download the distribution or join the community, visit The Fedora Project at www.fedoraproject.org.

For more information on the Fedora and the projects listed above, please visit:

Fedora: http://www.fedoraproject.org
Aeolus: http://www.aeolusproject.org
Deltacloud: http://www.deltacloud.org
Openstack: http://www.openstack.org
HekaFS: http://hekafs.org/
Gluster: http://www.gluster.org/
Pacemaker-cloud: http://pacemaker-cloud.org/
Sheepdog: http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/

Check out Fedora Cloud SIG contributor Mo Morsi's screencast demonstrating Aeolus deploying the same instance to multiple cloud providers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Yb7I4M6mo&feature=player_embedded